After
by Riona
Summary: Mike/Sam, post-game. Mike and Sam have been broken by their experiences. It's a little easier when they can be broken together.


It ends between him and Jess not long after that night. She starts crying when he tries to touch her, and he pulls back straight away.

"What's wrong?" he asks, although he already knows. The last time they were this close to each other, she got dragged through a window. It's not like he wasn't thinking it as well.

"I'm sorry," she chokes out. "It's not you. It's – I just—"

"It's fine." He strokes her hair, careful to use the hand that still has all its fingers. "We both went through a lot of crap. You don't have to explain it."

She wraps her arms around him, and they just hold each other until dawn.

* * *

He suspends his college studies and moves back in with his parents. They're worried but sympathetic. "You've been through hell," his mom says. "You can stay as long as you need to."

"I'll be fine in a couple months. You don't need to worry." He's said it so many times he can almost believe it himself.

He guesses he's lucky. His parents don't really understand, and he wouldn't expect them to, but they're trying.

Sam visits a lot. They were never that close before; they just happened to know the same group of people. But maybe something was forged between them, up on that mountain.

They don't talk about it at first, but all their other conversations seem to run dry in seconds. On her fourth visit, when they've been sitting in silence for a minute or so, Sam leans close to him and takes his hand.

"It was real, wasn't it?" she asks, very quietly.

He squeezes her hand back. "It was real. Sorry."

And it's like something has been loosened inside his chest. He doesn't really want to talk about it, but not talking about it is worse.

* * *

"I could have shot Emily."

"You didn't," Sam says.

He rolls over on his bed to face the wall. "I could have killed her. For no reason. I just – I keep seeing it happen, and—"

A hand on his shoulder, and he nearly has a fucking heart attack before his common sense breaks through and reminds him that it's only Sam.

"It didn't happen," Sam says. "Emily is fine. And we all know you'd never have shot her."

She's sweet, but she's wrong. He could have done it. He came so close to doing it. He was – all he'd been able to think of was going off to get the key, leaving Sam and Chris and Ashley with Emily, and coming back to find them all dead.

"Yeah," he mumbles, still staring at the wall. "I guess you're right."

They're both quiet for a moment.

"You know, you're allowed to be a mess as well," he says. "Don't let me hog all the trauma. I've done the whole 'I'm a pillar of strength' thing and I know it's not fun." He'd tried so hard to seem stable in front of Jess, so she'd know she had someone to rely on if she broke down. He couldn't be that for her if he was breaking down as well.

"Well, maybe I really am a pillar of strength."

He manages to laugh, just about. His mind's still back in that basement.

"I was sure she was gonna press charges," he says. "Emily, I mean."

"She almost did."

He takes a moment to digest that, and then he looks around at Sam. She's smiling, just a little, sitting on the side of his bed.

"You talked her out of it?" he asks.

She shrugs. "Pretty sure we'd all have died without you."

"That doesn't mean I didn't point a gun at her face," he says. "You should've let her go through with it."

"Mike."

He's able to dredge up a smirk from somewhere. "You'd have survived without me, anyway." It feels like all he did was screw up. He got Josh killed. He dragged everyone out of the safe room for a key they didn't need. He can't even think about earlier than that, what he did to Hannah, what happened to her and her sister, what Josh put everyone through because of it. So many consequences spiralling out from one stupid prank. "Looked to me like you were the hero back there."

"I wouldn't have done it without you," she says. "I think you made me braver."

He doesn't know what to say after that, and apparently neither does she, because she excuses herself soon afterwards.

* * *

Whenever he hears a noise he can't be sure of, he has to get up and check the whole house. It happens every day, sometimes four or five times. He knows his parents are getting sick of it.

It's always nothing, or the dog. But he keeps checking, just in case one day it isn't.

He can't imagine ever not being like this. He guesses he'll be doing daily patrols for the rest of his life; he guesses he'll always be turning on the heating the second the temperature drops. And there are only six people in the world who'll be able to understand it. One of them never wants to see him again. He's not sure he'll ever make up with Matt, either, after what he almost did to Emily.

What if they all drift away from each other? What if the others die before him? What if he's left with no one who knows what they've been through?

* * *

"Do you ever miss it?" he asks Sam one day.

"Miss what?"

He can't explain it, not if she doesn't already know. She'll look at him like he's one of those monsters, like she looked at Josh after she found out what he'd been doing.

"The mountain?" she asks, tilting her head incredulously. "The time we all nearly died?"

"I don't know," he mutters. "I just... I don't really know how to get back to normal life, you know? At least I knew what I was trying to do up there."

"Survive," Sam says.

"Survive," he agrees. "And now I feel like I'm just kind of waiting for the next near-death experience, and it never comes."

"That's not a bad thing."

"I know."

There's a pause. He can't bring himself to meet her eyes.

"But I kind of know what you mean," she says.

He looks up at her then. They're both sitting on the side of his bed, and she's close, and she's saved his life more than once. Strands of her hair have escaped her ponytail; he hasn't seen her with a bun since the mountain.

He's not sure _he_ knows what he means, but apparently she does.

He reaches out to stroke her hair behind her ear. He tries not to use his mutilated hand for anything, just so he doesn't have to look at it, but somehow he finds himself using it now.

She touches his wrist. Some part of him can still feel the heat of the lodge as they watched it burn together.

Mike's always thought of kissing as a prelude to getting into someone's pants. It's nice enough, but it's more a roadside attraction on the way to the big destination than anything else. Maybe that's just another part of his old self he's left behind.

When he kisses Sam, it doesn't feel like it has to go anywhere. He just... wants to be close to her. Because right now he feels like she's maybe the only person on the planet who knows what's happening in his head. He definitely doesn't. She might.

Her hand is warm and real on his arm. He presses closer, tries to lose himself in her, to forget everything, and for a moment he almost, _almost_ manages it.


End file.
